The video game industry is no stranger to boom and bust cycles, where dozens of opportunistic developers strive to unleash copycat competitors of the latest massive hit, and most, if not all, fail. Perhaps the most important example – and certainly the most embarrassing for almost everyone involved – was the race to free the mythical “Wow Killer”: a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that would unseat Blizzard's global megahit, world of warcraftand earn its creators millions of dollars in monthly subscription revenue until the end of time.
It turned out to be an epic industry-wide failure, and I had a front-row seat to this unfortunate spectacle. My career in games journalism began in 2004, just a few months earlier. Wow was released. My obsessive love of gaming threatened to ruin that career before it really began, but instead I took advantage of it, specializing in covering a genre of gaming that was too arcane and time-consuming for most writers and editors to get their hands on. your goal. heads around. I traveled to dozens of preview events for MMO hopefuls that PR reps would optimistically tout as “world of warcraftbut for football”, or “world of warcraftbut for vehicular combat.” In 2008, Eurogamer hired me as editor of their short-lived MMO section (let's not pretend we in the press were immune to the same misguided gold rush thinking) and I discovered firsthand exactly why the entire company was doomed to fail. .
One reason is that world of warcraft – especially during its heyday between 2004 and 2010 – was simply too good to top. But another is that hit-hunting, not a great strategy at the best of times, is nearly impossible to achieve in the world of online social gaming. Hits attract intensely loyal and committed audiences who stream them month after month and aren't really looking for something else to move on to.
Those audiences are hermetically locked within their own fandoms and care much less about shiny graphics or other technical advances, while constantly updated games have plenty of room to innovate and evolve the genre within themselves. The traditional tactic of “just give it a big license (like Star Wars)” is less effective in this sphere as well, because the appeal of famous characters and stories doesn't necessarily apply: players are more involved in their communities.
However, the industry continues to make this critical mistake with online gaming. Just look at the spectacular crash and burn of Concord earlier this year, itself just the latest of countless attempts to knock Overwatch off its hero-shooter throne. With a spirit of constructive learning and just a little schadenfreudeLet's take a look at some of the games that failed to make a dent world of warcraftThe hegemony of… and the few who had it.
lord of the rings online (2007): This entry is perhaps a little unfair, as several people had been trying to make a Middle-earth MMO based on Tolkien's works long before Blizzard had even thought about it. Wow. The original developer, an MMO specialist called Turbine, probably thought it was just creating another niche online game before publisher WB Games became overly excited about its potential. The match was good, but clearly a generation behind. Wow in terms of its design. People still play it though!
Age of Conan (2008): Oh My dear. The first and most instructive case of post-Wow The hubris came from Funcom, a Norwegian specialist that went way out of its depth by trying to bring cutting-edge graphics, gore, sex and dynamic real-time sword fighting into an MMO based on Robert E. Howard's lusty fantasy world. The publisher Eidos left all its chips; I remember attending an absurd press event held in the 1952 Winter Olympic park in Oslo, which had been transformed into a medieval setting with horse-riding barbarians and fireside feasts. (A PR rep I was with got very drunk and stole a sheepskin rug, roaring incoherently into the Scandinavian night as he carried it over his shoulders.) The game was a disaster at launch and tanked a lot.
Warhammer Online: Age of Doomsday (2008): EA's big move made sense on paper; the Warhammer license is probably as close as legally possible to the Warcraft setting, and developer Mythic's Dark Ages of Camelot was loved by the MMO die-hard. The game was luxurious and expensive, but limited in design, too focused on massive player versus player combat, while Wow he excelled at adopting almost every play style possible. warhammer online It was closed in 2013.
APB: All Points Bulletin (2010): A Grand Theft Auto-style massively multiplayer game that features intense levels of player customization and is directed by GTA creator David Jones himself? What could go wrong? All! APB It was packed with ambitious features, but was noticeably lacking in gameplay. Additionally, Jones' company, Realtime Worlds, which had previously made the excellent Bell for Xbox, it was too deep. A disastrous launch was followed within a couple of months by the developer's bankruptcy and APB being closed. Another company bought it and re-released it, but failed to include an actual game.
Crack (2011): The MMO gold rush wasn't just about games; Entire companies emerged that attracted huge investments with the promise of some revolutionary technology. Trion Worlds was an example that featured sophisticated server-side technology that was supposed to bring MMOs closer to the dream of fully simulated cloud gaming. Unfortunately, their flagship fantasy MMO Crack It was very boring.
Star Wars: The Old Republic (2011): Hurt by the failure of warhammer onlineEA, however, was ready for another chance to crush Wowarmed with the Star Wars license, its star in-house developer BioWare, and a seemingly unlimited budget. Expectations were off the charts, but BioWare's expertise was in single-player games. Everyone bought it, followed the story, and moved on, which…isn't the point. However, BioWare did not give up and steadily developed a proper massively multiplayer game around the story campaigns. After a successful relaunch of the free-to-play game, The old republic still has an audience.
Guild Wars 2 (2012): Guild Wars 2 It's actually a fantastic game, easily the best on this list; I feel bad for including it. It has refined the combat and employed several ideas that defined the genre and were later copied by Wow, Destinationand others. But the scope of this relatively streamlined game didn't live up to the hopes that publisher NCSoft had for it (and the ever-increasing Wow it presented a moving target that could never be caught.
wild star (2014): NCSoft, a big player in Korea, made its most determined attempt to break the West with wild stara game from former Blizzard developers with a very Warcraft color palette and art style. It was cute, expensive, innovative, and had some fun ideas, but it was also very obviously a hodgepodge of trends with no reason to exist beyond trying to beat trends. Wow. It was shut down by NCSoft and developer Carbine in 2018.
The game almost killed WoW
Final Fantasy 14 (2013): The award for perseverance goes to Square Enix, which simply didn't give up and, more importantly, had reasons other than competing with Blizzard to create an MMO. Final Fantasy 11 had been a pre-Wow hit in 2002; the first attempt to follow it with FF14 in 2010 it was a disaster, but Square Enix bravely scrapped it and asked producer Naoki Yoshida for a complete revamp. It was a matter of honor, in any case. Yoshida's reboot ruled, and Square Enix didn't fail when it didn't do so right away Wow numbers, but continued investing. FF14 constantly got bigger and better, and was ready and waiting when Blizzard stumbled upon a succession of public relations disasters and lackluster Wow expansions in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Wow streamers and players who are starting to leave for FF14 in masses, and the Square Enix game is, finally, the competitor that Wow He has always deserved it.